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Transcendent Philosophy 2, 129-140 ' London Academy of Iranian Studies

Ethical Dimensions of God-to-Man Relation according to Rumi and Ibn Arabi


Andrey Smimov, Institute of Philosophy, Russia

Abstract
Good and evil are often regarded as the most general, and at the same time universal categories that shape human moralities and ethical theories. Islamic ethics is no exception. The Quran uses the concepts of khayr good and sharr evil to denote what the world as a whole with its various parts and events taking place in it can bring to the human being. Good and evil as philosophical categories were elaborated in Mutazilism and later in Sufism along the lines generally adopted in Islamic ethics. As for the falAsifa, they were largely dependant on Aristotelian and, even more, Neoplatonic view on good and evil. Although the Mutazilites and the Soils proceed from the intuitions of the Quran, their theories differ from it in at least one respect. Quran regards good and evil as relative categories. Something is evil not because it participates in an evil principle, but because its bad effects are overweighing the good ones. Fiqh adopts the same basis for prohibiting and sanctioning, and therefore the prohibited may easily be not only sanctioned ad hoc but even prescribed as obligatoty if its good effect prevails over the evil one in a given situation. As for the Mutazilites, they strive to treat good and evil as consistently non-relative categories, claiming at the same time that the outcome and the meaning of the Divine actions is only good and never evil, e.g., they argue that the punishment of sinners is not an evil for them but a manifestation of Gods concern about their fate resulting out of His benevolence. Sufism can be treated as an interpreter of this Islamic legacy, as it proceeds along the line of non-relative philosophical approach to the good and evil. Ethical theories of Rumi and lbn Arabi, the two prominent SUIT thinkers, appear at the first glance to be opposite. They seemingly may be qualified as ethical dualism on the part of RUmi he accepts the

dichotomy of good and evil which are sharply distinct and immiscible principles vs. ethical monism on the part of Ibn Arabi whose basic assumption resulting out of his ontologism is all is good. This qualification seems to be confirmed by these authors elaboration of traditional ethical topics like love ishq and beloved mashuq. temptation fitna, thankfulness shukr. patience sabr and complaint shakwa, autonomy of human will ikhtiyar and action fil, attitude towards other religions. However, I will argue that this opposition is not as sharp as it might appear after the comparison of the relevant texts. Epistemological theoiy which Ibn Arabi calls perplexity ayra treats the truth as an entwinement of the two opposites that would ordinarily be considered mutually exclusive. Therefore his ethical monism does not rule out dualism, but on the contrary presupposes it according to the strategy of the perplexed hair reasoning. Rumi moves from the other end, as his dualistic theses develop into discourse which leads him to what at least logically is compatible with ethical monism.

M. Fakhry, a well-known scholar of Islamic ethics, points in his fundamental study Ethical Theories in Islam to the scarcity of ethical thought in Islamic philosophy. There is a good reason to agree with that, but only as far asfalsqfa which is the chief object of M. Fakhrys attention, as well as the Ismili and, to some extent, the Ishraqi thought which remained outside the scope of his book are concerned. These schools of Islamic philosophy followed mainly Greek, which means in this case chiefly Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, way of understanding the good and the evil and developed ethics along these lines. But as far as the philosophical Kalam and T4sawwuf are concerned, this statement does not appear as valid. I will consider the basics of the ethical thought of the two prominent Sufi thinkers, Jalal al-Din Rmi 1207-1273 and Mujiyi al-Din Tbn Arabi 1165-1240, in the general perspective of Islamic approach to the concepts of good and evil. While doing so, I will be distinguishing between the religious and the philosophical treatments of the topic as the relative and the absolute understandings of these categories.

Islamic ethics appears to be no exception from the well-known assumption that the good and the evil are the basic and universal moral ideas. It is rather obvious that the concept of good khayr is one of the chief Quranic notions. Frequency of its occurrence, among other things, testifies to that. The term khayr good appears in the Quran 176 times, not to speak about its derivatives. The term sharr evil is by far less frequent, as it occurs only 31 times throughout the Quranic text. Though in a very simplified form, these facts reflect the general optimistic approach of Islam to the basic ethical issues. Of course, khayr and sharr are not the only terms that denote the concepts of good and evil, although they are expressive enough in the context of the present discussion. In the Quran and the Sunna the good and the evil are treated as relative rather than absolute concepts. It means that if the Sharia prohibits some things, it does so not because those things participate in a certain evil principle, but because the good that results out of these things is by far and without doubt outbalanced by the evil they bring. Such is, for example, the gambling which, though bringing delight to the human soul which is a certain good, results in an evil that beyond doubt outweighs this benefit, since the gambler might lose his part of the camel and later starve together with his family. What is more important and even worse in its effects, is the fact that gambling absorbs the man totally and leaves no place in his soul for the true faith and affection. The same applies to perhaps the most important thing in religious ethics. People are persuaded to adopt the true faith because Islam will certainly to bring the good to its followers both in this life and in the hereafter, whereas other faiths might bring some benefits to their adherents on the earth but will inevitably cause evil after death which is a settled fact at least in the case of mushrikun. The balance of good and evil is quite obvious and is supposed to motivate the human behavior.

The attitude adopted infiqh is basically the same. The five categories al-ai/cam al-/thamsa classifS the human deeds as good or evil after sorting out the muba/z actions those that leave the Lawgiver indifferent. The juridical aspect is thus added to the ethical estimation of human actions. It seems important that this ethical aspect is not forced out by the juridical one in the reasoning of the fuqaha or overshadowed by it. The most radical evaluation is expressed by the wajib-mahzur obligatory-interdicted pair of categories, whereas the non-mandatory prohibitions and prescriptions fall into the sunna-makrflh class of opposites. However, even the most extreme of these categories do not express the absolute and unchangeable evaluations of the thing, as they can easily be swapped with the change of context which reverses the balance of good and evil. The /thamr alcohol is a well-known example of that kind. Its consumption is prohibited absolutely mab.zur in ordinary contexts because of the evil resulting out of its usage. But if a Muslim had a choke and might die, and has no other liquid to drink, he/she not only may but is obliged to save his! her life by drinking some alcohol. Thus the usage of khamr in a given situation becomes not just permitted, but obligatory wajib. Philosophy puts aside this strategy of relative and context-dependant evaluation. Instead, it adopts the absolute standpoint which results out of the basic philosophical attitude which the Western tradition usually calls the critical spirit. The Philosopher would not agree to take something external and not belonging to the thing under consideration as the ground for its qualification. The basis and the foundation of all the things qualities needs to be discovered inside, not outside, the thing. The Mutazilites were the first Islamic thinkers to make an attempt of building up such absolute ethical evaluation. I will speak about the two themes which seem important for our present purposes out of the plentitude of topics addressed by the early Mutakallimun.

Firstly, it is the question concerning the qualification of the Divine acts. On very rare occasions did the Mutazilites agree among themselves, but this question was one of those. As al-Ashari relates, in fact all of them shared the opinion that the evil created by God is only called evil metaphorically majaz, it is not evil in its reality haqiqa. In the light of the semiotic theory of ma 1n literally sense and its indication dalala, which was developed already in the early Islamic philosophical and philological thought, this thesis means the following. Any act of God and all the things created by Him indicate only the good as their man sense as long as the proper, or the true indication flaqiqa is concerned. But the Quran speaks about the evil brought to the unbelievers by Gods acts, e.g., calamities in this life and punishment in the hereafter. However, the Mutazilites argue that evil is not the proper sense indicated by these Divine actions. Evil is the proper sense of some other things, the place of which the Divine acts occupy in such cases and therefore indicate the evil as their metaphorical sense. In a similar way the Mutazilites solved the problem of unbelievers damnation Ia na by God. According to them, it is not evil but justice adi, wisdom, good and appropriate salafl for the unbelievers Maqalat al-islamiyyin, Wiesbaden 1980, p.249. Secondly, it is the question of whether the act prescribed by the Sharia is a good act flasana by itself or by virtue of Gods commandment, and, accordingly whether the forbidden act is a bad act sayyi a by itself or because of the Divine prohibition. The Mutazilites were doiig their best to reach the rational explanation of the questions asked. Following the same line and proceeding from their assumption that the things have their own nature not overwhelmed in certain cases even by the Divine will, some of them agreed on the following. What the God could have never prescribed as obligatory and what He could have never prohibited is good and evil by itself As for the commandments which could have been

given in an opposite way to what we find in the Shari a, they are good or evil only because the God commanded so and have no good or evil quality in themselves. Thus the early Mutakallimun declared the absolutely good character of the Divine acts and grounded the Divine Law in universal ethics, drawing a distinction between the ethically justified commandments and those given arbitrarily-. Palasifa, the Ismaili and the early Ishraqi thinkers can hardly be said to be inventive in the sphere of ethics. Tn philosophy per se they followed mainly the Neoplatonic paradigm in treating the problem of good and evil and stuck to the Aristotelian and Platonic models in the books on temperaments and their improvement numerous Tahdhib al-akhlaq treatises which would baffle even the most patient of readers by their endlessly varying classifications of the souls faculties, or simply reproduced the Greek prototypes adding little new e.g., Risala fT tnahiyyat a!- ad! Treatise on the Essence of Justice by Miskawayh. All this could hardly help in settling the ethical issues that faced the Muslim society. Now let us consider the foundations of ethical thought of the two prominent SUIT thinkers, Jalal al-Din Rutni and Muyi al-Din Ibn Arabi. At the first glance, they appear to be incompatible, if not contradictory. Let us first speak about them in general, and later get down to the details and concrete examples. What Rumi says could be put down as follows. Good and evil are the two opposites that never meet. The goal of the human being is to distinguish the one from the other, to set them apart and never mix them up. Those two notions are the instrument of universal ethical categorisation: any human deed is classified as either good or evil,

and the human goal is to stay as far from evil and as close to good as possible. Taken in that generalised form, the ethical basics of Run-iis thought appear only too familiar to anyone brought up in Christian or Judaic milieu. And perhaps this is no incident, if we take into account the fact that the ancient Persian thought had beyond doubt influenced the Persian Muslim thinkers, poets and philosophers alike. The sharply drawn distinction between the good and the evil as the two principles of the universe is the basic feature of this ancient Persian legacy. The claim that some contemporary authors make saying that Zoroastrianism could have influenced the Jewish thought and could have given rise to the Jewish ethics is not quite without ground. If this is true to at least some extent, then this similarity of ethical basics that we find in Rn,nis writing and in those of the Christian and Jewish authors seems less surprising. As for lbn Arabi, his position looks strikingly different from what Rumi puts down as an indubitable principle. Al-Shaykh al-akbar argues that nothing is evil as such hi a!- ayn, and that every thing in the universe should rather be evaluated positively, as good. If so, what is the reason for the prescriptions and prohibitions of the Divine law? Rumi is quite definite on that point, as he sets the good aside from the evil and says that the Supreme God... is pleased only by the good Kitab fl-hi ma fl-hi, Tehran 1330, p.179. But if, as lbn Arabi puts it, everything in the world belongs to the domain of the existence wujud, and since the existence belongs only to the God the theory which was to be called later wafidat al-wujud unity of existence, any thing is by virtue of that fact good in itself and never evil,-- if so, why should anything at all be prohibited? Many scholars of Ibn Arabis thought find parallels for his ideas in Neoplatonic writings. To make justice to the Great Shaykh, I would say that at least in that issue he does not follow the Neoplatonic trend of thought and does not adopt the idea of evil as the lack of existence. This idea

equalizing the material and the bad was readily available at the Islamic intellectual market, and al-Farabi or Ibn Sin are only the too well-known names who made good use of it. But Ibn Arabi insists that this is not the case, and any of the least admired things in the world, e.g., garlic, is only good when considered in itself. Why then did the Prophet detest it? He disliked not the garlic as such, Ibn Arabi insists, but its smell ra 1w Fu.su.s al-hikam, Beirouth 1980, p.22 1. It is so because the thing as such ayn can never be qualified as disliked makruh, only its outward and relative effects can be treated that way. This ontologism of Ibn Arabi leads him to conclusions that would seem rather bizarre when introduced without the philosophical reasoning that stands behind them. Perhaps the most striking for the ordinary Muslim mentality is the claim that no religion is wrong, and that every worshipper worships only the One and the True God. This is rather uncommon even as pure theory. However, lbn Arabi does not stop at this point and draws the logically inevitable conclusion saying that those who were trying to make people abandon their wrong faiths, were thus preventing them from worshipping the God and therefore were acting in fact against His will. Even the odious Pharaoh of the Quran appears in Fu.s4 al-jiikam as the server of God, and following the argumentation of the Great Shaykh we cannot but agree with his logically consistent reasoning as long as we accept his basic ontological position which is qualified as wafldat aI-wujud. This, to put it mildly, religious tolerance of Ibn Arabi of which I am citing only a few examples out of many stands in sharp contrast to Rutnrs position. Treating the question of the true faith, Rini is quite definite in drawing a distinctive line between Islam and all other religions. He does not hesitate to criticize not only pagan beliefs or actions of the adversaries of Islam, but Christianity as well Fi-h1 p.124-125, proceeding from rather orthodox reasons quite

evident for anyone e.g., Rutni asks how a humble creature like Isa can hold the seven heavens with all their weight, taking this argument quite literally. Addressing of the issue of love ishq, Rumi feels little doubt that there is the real beloved mashuq flaqiqi to be set apart from other objects of love that do not comply with that criteria Fl-hi, p.160. It is not difficult to see how distinct this position is from that of Ibn Arabi when he says the God is not contained by any direction ayn, literally where but is to be found everywhere, and that the human being is to discover Him always, not only when facing the qibla Fu.su.s, p.80, 114 and other, or when he insists that any temptation Jitna can easily be overcome not by turning away from the wrong object of affection but by making it the real one through seeing it as a manifestation of God al-Futuflat al-makkiyya, Beirouth, vol.4, p.453-456. I was arguing that Ibn Arabis position is quite consistent with his basic assumption that the Reality is one and all-encompassing, and therefore it is impossible to differ from it or somehow deviate from the Real in any of our actions. As for Rumi, he also hardly doubts that the human being is more than just a creature under Gods command, and warns us against underestimating our real value. In Fl-hi he compares the man to pure gold and says that it would be a folly to make a turnip pot out of it. The precious jewel of the human spirit is for Rumi, not unlike Ibn Arabi, the image of God. To put it in one word, Runii is not an adversary of lbn Arabis wafidat al-wujud theory. If so, why do the ethics of the two thinkers appear so different? Rumi proceeds from the dualism of good and evil which never come together, while Ibn Arabis position is rather to be called ethical monism. There should be little doubt that the Persian cultural legacy left its trace in Rumis thought, whereas it could hardly have influenced Ibn Arabis theory. Is the difference between the two thinkers explained by the diversity of their cultural background? Or perhaps there is much more similarity than it appears at first glance between their views due to their common ontological premises?

To answer this question, let us take a closer look at how Rmi explains the relation between the existence of good and evil and the fact that the God is pleased only by the good. Addressing this topic, Rumi introduces the notion of the Divine will it-ada. Unlike the Mutazilites, he does not hesitate to say that the God wills both the good and the evil Fl-hi, p.179, which is meant to say that the God creates them. However, what is the evil short- that Rumi is speaking of? On the one hand, it is the real, not the metaphorical evil that he has in mind. In this point Rumi differs from the Mutazilites with their universal tendency to treat every evil brought by the acts of God to the human being as majz metaphor, not the reality. On the other hand, this evil, since it is evil really zaqiqatan, not metaphorically, is evil as such hi a!- ayn. This standpoint becomes quite evident when Rutni says: The willing of evil sharr would have been bad qabiji if He willed it for its sake li-ayni-hi PT-hi, p.180, which would be impossible if the evil had not been evil by itself hi a!- ayn. This means that Rumi does not take advantage of the possibility that Ibn Arabi benefits from when he says that everything is exclusively good as such but is either good or evil according to human tastes, affections and dislikes, in short, that everything is good or evil only as established hi a!-wal, that is, relatively, not absolutely and not substantially. Rmi goes a different way. He says that the evil is willed not for its sake, but rather for the sake of the good. This thesis is coupled with another one: no good can be brought to the human being in this world if that human being is not suffering from certain evil. As the teacher is willing for the ignorance of his pupils because otherwise he would have been unable to instruct them, as the baker is willing for the hunger of his customers to feed them, as the doctor is willing for the illness of his patients to cure them, in the same way the God is willing for the evil in the world to bring the good to people Fl-hi,

p.179. Rutni even addresses the topic of the ruler and his subordinates, which is the closest analogy of the God-to-man relation, and says that the rulers are willing for the disobedience and even for attacks of the enemies to manifest their power and authority, though they are not pleased by them. Taking these two theses together, we discover that, according to Rumi, it is impossible to will the good without willing the evil, although the evil is willed only for the sake of the good and never for itself Rumi is quite definite on that point as he stresses: The adversary says [that the God] wills evil in no aspect. But it is impossible to will the thing and not to will all its concomitants lawazirn FT-hi p.1 79. This adds a new and very important dimension to the otherwise sharp distinction between the good and the evil drawn by Rumi, since it means that it is impossible to establish the exclusive goodness and to rule out the evil, at least in this world, and that the evil and the good are by their very nature so closely intertwined that they do not come without each other. Now Rumrs position appears much closer to Ibn Arabis monism, and especially to his strategy of the perplexed fia ir reasoning which shifts from one of the opposites to the other without ever making a stop and treating each as a prerequisite for the other and its concomitant. To make the last but very important step in this short exploration of Rumrs ethical thought, we must return to the mainstream of our discussion to answer the following question: how is the evil, the prerequisite of the good, exemplified in the case of the direct God-to-man ethical not ontological relation, which is the case of the Divine law, its prescriptions and prohibitions? In the examples discussed above the baker, the teacher, etc., the evil as the necessary condition for the good is represented by a certain state of the object of benevolence: hunger of those to be fed,

ignorance of those to be instructed. Something very similar is to be found in the human being as such, when treated in general in his relation to the God. Such is the unwillingness of man to follow the path of good and his inclination to choose the evil. For that, and only for that reason was the Law given to people. In his well-known argument Rumi says that no one calls Do not eat the stones! a prohibition, and no one calls Consume the viands! addressed to a hungry man a prescription, although these phrases, from the point of view of linguistics, are a prohibition nahy and prescription amr. They are not called so for the reason that no obstacle stays in their way to being implemented, because the human being would naturally and without hesitation behave that way. However, the human being is endowed with the soul which commands him to do evil things nafs ainmra bi al-su Quran 12:53, and it is this evil soul that the God wills and that lie creates for the man in order to pour His benefits on him and lead him towards the good. This means that the human spirit is a place where the two kinds of orders, those of his own soul prone to evil and those coming from the God Himself, meet to come in conflict. Thus the human being in Rumrs thought is endowed with a chance to choose freely between the two opposite commandments, those of God and of his own soul, and to proceed in either of the two directions presented to him as options.

Transcendent Philosophy 2, 129-140 ' London Academy of Iranian Studies

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